I wonder that too. I have implemented forward and inverse search with synctex and xpdf with a help of custom scripts. But I needed the "-remote" command to do that. I have reverted to the 3.04 version for this reason. I really hope to see it back.

Today, I upgraded to xpdf 4.00 based on openmotif (arch linux pac upgrade), but I was baffled to see that -remote functionality not being available any longer.

Sorry about that. There were a lot of things I wanted to get into the 4.00 release, but at some point I had to stop and get the release out the door. But I'm definitely planning to add remote server mode back in.

If you -- or anyone else -- is interested in beta testing a patch to add remote server mode, please contact me (xpdf@xpdfreader.com). I don't know yet when it will ready, but I'll let you know, and I'll also post here.

# Start up xpdf, and open something.pdf.
xpdf -remote foo 'openFile(something.pdf)'
# Switch to page 7 in the already-open something.pdf. If the user
# has closed xpdf in the meantime, this will restart it and reopen
# the file.
xpdf -remote foo 'checkOpenFileAtPage(something.pdf, 7)'

The patch adds some new commands: openFile, openFileAtPage, openFileAtDest, checkOpenFile, checkOpenFileAtPage, checkOpenFileAtDest. The "check" versions check to see if the file is already open, and avoid re-opening it, to make things a little faster.